Looking Out.
Looking In.
Always Edgy.

May 2010

17 May 2010

I was reading about the training of the New York bomb suspect in the New York Times this morning when I stepped out of my front door to pick up a postcard I'd received in the mail. It screamed: “Hello, Bombshell!”

I've been called many things, including "aunty-grandma", by my niece's two lovely children. But no one, not my husband, not my many male friends, no one, has ever, ever addressed me as "bombshell".

In five minutes, I went from feeling anxious about the potential threat of a "bomb" blast in a public thoroughfare to feeling lightheaded about the word's many possible extensions and their connotations.

The "bombshell" card created for me was an elaborate and, not for want of a word, revelatory booklet. It promised me that it would give me a push-up. It showed me several examples of how today’s young ladies have hydro-thermal lifted breasts powered by under-wired, electromagnetic bras. Inside the booklet, there was a surprise: a card with which I could go over to a physical store to get myself a free power panty.

Wait a minute, I thought. My body is no twin-engine Cessna. Why do I need all that propelling? I didn't jet-set in high-octane circles. Shrugging at the many options for revving up the taxiing curve of my sensuality, I wrote a gentle "thanks, but no thanks" note to the very kind old lady who sent me the card.

My dear Victoria:

I got the card you sent me last week and I thank you for wanting to share your secret with me.

I don't understand why all your models pose the way they do. I'm mortified that my twenty-something daughter refuses to see what I see. Don't you see, how in all their photographs, teens and young adults now pose like girls with a hundred un-Victorian secrets? They plump up their lips, pout them just so and smolder through smoky eyes, their hands on their thrusting hip and their bodies tilted just enough so the profile of their bodies burns through the lens? The cleavage you give your girls amazes me. So much so that we, as a family, have stopped traveling. Last year, when my son suggested that our family go to Kenya to see the Great Rift Valley, I said, "Why, son. Let's go to that store called Victoria's Secret."

My daughter doesn't understand me when I tell her that the models you hire aren't all that pretty in spite of that secret boost and all the other stuff you do for them with your underwear promises.

"Mom, have you even looked at Heidi Klum?" she asks.

"Sweetheart," I say to her. "I don't care how Heidi Plums looks. All I know is that I don't like how she and all the other girls who came after her are staring out of all those big mall windows with navels that measure over an inch. Your brother is looking at those magnified body parts and thinking things."

That same day my daughter goes into your store and comes back with something that looks like a strip of cloth.

"Cute elastic hair band," I say. "I didn't know they made them with polka dots now."

"Mom...um... That's not a hair band."

"What is it? A cloth bracelet?"

"No."

"Okay. I know. it's an eye-patch. You know the kind they give in economy on Cathay Pacific so you can sleep in peace and not see any light until the Asian passengers open their land mine can of noodles."

"Mo-om, stop!" she shouts. "It's just a panty. Can't you see?"

I cannot. You see, there isn't that much to see.

Dear, dear, Victoria. I don't understand. Just WHEN did panties downsize this much? The panties you offer look like they’ll make a face mask for the squirrel that’s scuttling down my lawn as I write.

If you must offer me a gift, give me one that covers a substantial bit of my skin. Now if you said you wanted a cover for an iPad and Steve Jobs sent you one for an iPod, how do you think YOU would feel?

For now, Vic, I'm okay. Last month, I bought myself a multi-colored pack of low-rise Fruit of the Loom cotton hipster panties at Costco at $6.50 for three. You'd have made ten of those hair-bands for ten times the price with that much cloth, I know.

I have enough and more of the big aunty underwear, the kind that suppress my giggles and depress my jiggles. Yes, I have enough wide-width brassieres which won't projectile launch me into orbiting Jupiter.

So, keep the secret, Victoria. The truth is, for a while at least, my cups runneth over.

14 May 2010

“You’ve never come home. I’d really like you to visit us tomorrow evening with your family. Can you?” The tone at the other end of the line last October was warm and friendly, with a sparkle, a fullness and an echo that rings only in the voices of some people.

My husband and I made it a point to visit her home the following evening.Cars packed the roads leading to her sprawling home.Peals of laughter rose into the night air. The tinkle of glass and metal warmed the growing chill of a fall evening. Sandals lined the porch of her home, building little mountains of silver and gold and rhinestones, mingling in abandon, until you couldn’t tell one pair from the other. We stepped into her charming home.

“Oh, I’m so glad you came!” Susie Nagpal rushed to us from somewhere inside her house, hugged us tight for having taken the trouble to stop at her place on a busy Navarathri evening packed with many other social visits up and down the valley. There were over a hundred people inside the home on this special night but between the hustle and bustle of attending to others, she made sure she squeezed in the time to talk to us and make us feel at home.

That night we caught Susie Nagpal on the periphery of her life. She didn’t know it then but a week after that meeting Susie would be diagnosed with advanced cancer. Today, eight months after I last met her and a little over twenty-four hours after she gave her body away to lung cancer, I wish I had seized the chance to know her better. For over three years prior, we had smiled and waved to each other, tentatively, from our respective cars as we dropped our children. We knew about each other’s existence but we never found the chance to chat. When I was offered the opportunity to host a coffee for her prior to her election into the Saratoga City Council in November 2008, I demurred. I didn’t know her. Did it make sense for me to host such a session? Instead, I attended a coffee for Susie at a mutual friend’s home and offered, like many others, to put up a campaign yard sign with her name on our front lawn.

I enjoyed the coffee session with Susie. In less than half an hour, she impressed me with her clarity, vision and sincerity. I realized then why, even though I didn’t know her well, I could have gone out of my way to open my doors for her at election time. Here was a woman who really believed she could make an impact on the city that had been a home to her for over two decades. During the session, I began appreciating her generosity. She asked us to get to know her opponents.She felt that they were also very qualified and that, in order to make a fair assessment, we must analyze their strengths. As far as she was concerned, she said, she was running, not on their weaknesses, but on her strengths.That morning, I drove back home excited that, if elected, she would be the first Indian-American on the Saratoga city council.I dug the yard sign deep into the soft, yielding ground outside on my front lawn. Not being an American citizen at the time, I couldn’t vote. But I wanted the world to know that my vote was for Susie Nagpal.

Susie’s passing yesterday brought back harsh memories of the demise of my own sister-in-law, a few years ago, at the age of 42. Both women–one an environmental engineer, the other, a gastroenterologist–had pluck and courage, and drive and dreams. Just like Susie, my sister-in-law dragged herself in to work until a few weeks before she breathed her last.

Time is supposed to heal. But every time another one sinks to the grave, it’s a reminder about the ones who passed before them. You may shed tears for the recently passed but you shed fresh tears for those who went before them. Yesterday, I sank into a cloud of despair and frustration about the ephemeral nature of our life on earth until my son came home from school, pressed his pimpled cheek close to mine and wondered, simply, why my skin smelt so good all the time.

In minutes, I was ready, once again, to face the world, although I knew that when the time came to attend a memorial service for Susie Nagpal, I would tear up wondering why I didn’t step out of my car to know her better during the times I hung behind her in the carpool lanes at Redwood Middle School. I regret that, for now and forever, my status onher page on Facebook and on that catch-all book we call “memories” will continue to read “Awaiting friend confirmation”.

09 May 2010

Yesterday, in San Francisco, the day rippled boat blue. People spilled out of their homes. Sidewalks shriveled.

On the bus down Van Ness, the driver chirped through the daily route of his day, a kind word to everyone who hopped on and off. Behind his merry twinkle, his bus, much like a bus in India's Mumbai, burst with grumpy lards of people. An Arab family clambered into the bus, stroller in hand. Their toddler, a bottle in his mouth, clung to the ends of his mother's scarf which ran over the top of her head and under her chin. An Amazon in her sixties sat by the front, assuming the role of assistant driver over fifteen blocks. Every time the bus stopped, she would holler, the edge in her voice making me feel sorry for her family. "Make room. Go in. Everybody in front, all the way to the back please." A Japanese girl with skin like roses and whipped cream sailed in, cell phone to her ear–a baguette in an assortment of San Francisco sour dough. I was traveling by a city bus after ten years. Why didn't I do it more often, I asked myself?

The last time I used public transportation, I was in Paris where, for a whole year, I rode the bus and the metro, standing shoulder to shoulder and toe to toe just to go about my daily life. There's something visceral about a daily journey with other people, remaining anonymous, exchanging pleasantries, staring at someone up close and wondering if their life is better than yours. It's exciting listen to a co-passenger chat on a cell-phone, to figure out the life of the person at the other end. I stood inside a packed bus yesterday, my hand grasping the railing tight as the bus braked countless times between lights. My painted toes were crushed, again and again, by sneaker-clad feet. My derriere was pummeled by large handbags and rear ends more panoramic than mine. For a half hour last afternoon, I was a map-holding speck in a galaxy of humanity and I too was trying to understand where I was headed. I clutched my purse. I hadn't heard of pickpockets on the buses in this city but who knew. The city does that to you. It makes you grow spines. Yet, at unexpected moments, it makes you soften, stop to think about another person and step forward to reach out. An elderly Jewish woman in thick glasses heaved herself up the steps, a cane in her hand. I got up to offer my seat. Watching me, a young man across me got up in haste and bade an older gentleman sit in his place. "No, young man, thank you, I've been sitting too long today," the old man smiled back.

Outside, on the roads of this charming city, I was reminded of my life growing up in Chennai, where I went and claimed my little patch of life and the vegetable vendor eked out a living in her portion and the many homeless scrambled for their piece of the action, sometimes snatching what everyone rightfully thought of as theirs. I turned the corner towards where my friend waited. Near the parking meter, a disheveled man tapped the owner of a parked van for a cigarette. The well-dressed gentleman gave him one from his pack, and lit the cigarette, a crooked smile forming on his face. I recalled how many times I'd seen this sight in Paris and in Chennai. What the surgeon-general never told us is that cigarettes bridge enormous social gaps.

I was about to leave for my safe and boring suburban life when a man came out of nowhere.

"C'mon back here, you whore!" he cried aloud, into the air, pushing a Safeway cart loaded with the debris of his life.

Afraid I was being called a lady of the night and quite certain I wasn't one, I quickly turned around to my friend of many years to see if the hapless gentleman could be referring to her. He was not. And then, convinced that the man was calling out to some other woman in the vicinity, we just crossed, a little shaken, right by where the cable car stood clanging, and walked on towards Saks Fifth Avenue, to begin window shopping, on an elastic budget of about $2000, for a new Mother's day wardrobe.

03 May 2010

I don’t have a mouth that promises wild wanton whispers like Angelina Jolie’s. It isn’t bird-like and terse and taut like Jennifer Aniston’s. When I’m not smiling, my mouth droops as if to say that the world isn’t a happy place. That’s about right anyway. My nose is short, pert and just. It comes to the point on most things. It keeps out of other people’s business (unless something happens to justify its mindful meddling). My eyes, evenly positioned on my face, voice my mind instantaneously. They don’t have a gate they open and shut when thoughts wander in unarmed (in the same way my mouth doesn’t have a spam filter when, really, it should). On my best days, my skin shines, sparkles and slithers like I’m on the late side of thirty.

Really, I don’t look too bad for nearing the half-century mark.

So enlighten me, please, won't you, as to why my passport photos tell me I need to check in at Guantanamo Bay?

Made for Guantanamo Bay?

Has anyone taken a passport photograph in the United States? At $7 a pop, an ugly passport photo shot on a polaroid camera which blinds you for life is at least twice the cost of a gallon of Berkeley Farms milk at my local Safeway. We've thought of every possible contraption in this country: the post-it note, the whitener, the velcro fastener, the PC, the iPod, iPhone. And just today Mr. Jobs put out the iPad on the shelves.

Won't someone please create an iPassport app so we click our mugs ourselves and create a passport photo that we like that makes consular officers treat us with more respect when we apply for a visa? Consular offices remind me of funeral homes. The people who go in there look mournful. They are talked to by people who conduct their business looking deathly serious. The visitors are dying to get out as quickly as they can. They spend the better part of the day inside the building and when they finally walk out, their faces are bathed in a curious glow of solemnity and relief.

As the owner of an Indian passport, I've spent the greater part of my life in consulates. Yesterday at a dreary consulate tucked inside a long hallway going to nowhere in a building in San Francisco, I was applying for a six-day tourist visa.

"Ma'am. Which hotel you stay at?" asks the lady to whom I turn in my papers.

"I didn't get appropriate answers to two emails. I called your offices in three states and I didn't get a response from any of them. Nothing, nothing, is in English except a six-line list of documents to bring which, by the way, did NOT, I repeat, NOT include hotel information."

"No hotel. No visa."

"I don't believe this. So I take all this trouble to follow through before my long drive from Saratoga to San Francisco, send you two emails for which I don't even get a decent response addressing my questions, call three offices to find out what else I may need to bring that the small English translation may have missed and all you can tell me is no hotel, no visa and that I have to come back all the way another day to give you the hotel information so you can grant me my visa?"

"Yes."

At about this time, another corpulent visa officer behind me tells me to shut up and settle down.

"Madame, when you came to America, did you have instructions in a language other than English? Tell me, yes or no. No, yes? So then, now you better settle down, okay?"

The officer tells me to use his computer to book a hotel. In seconds I have the name of a hotel after making a reservation online. The lady officer then gestures for me to go sit in a chair in front of a camera. Another dreadful picture to validate the dreadfulness of the picture I gave her. She stares at my photo and then at my face, shakes her head, pastes two stamps on the visa page, presses a seal on the stamps and waves me away. And, sure enough, every time I get a visa I walk out feeling I'm rising from the ashes. Strange, isn't it?

Back in the car, I look in my rear-view mirror. My eye-pencil has smudged under my eyes. My hair is out of place. But I don't look too bad. Not as bad as my passport photograph, at any rate.